Murdoch plans to launch business news channel to rival CNBC

NEW YORK – Rupert Murdoch has said that News Corporation plans to launch a business cable news channel to rival CNBC before the end of the year.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, the News Corp chairman said that plans were quite far advanced.

Murdoch said: "We're in pretty intense discussions with the biggest cable companies, and making quite considerable progress. You can expect something fairly soon."

The NBC-Universal-owned CNBC operates in the US and internationally. In Europe, the CNBC business channel is based in London and competes with Bloomberg and CNN.

In the interview, Murdoch questioned the buzz around content on portable devices such as iPods, pondering how big the market was, saying that unlike Disney's ABC, which is offering the likes of 'Lost' to download, Fox would not be offering its shows via iTunes.

"We're not knocked out by iPod so far. We've talked to them, to Google and others. But how many people really want to get video on a tiny screen when they already have TiVo or a similar service from their cable company or DirecTV?"

He also said that News Corp would compete with Google and Yahoo! online where it could, but said there would be no frontal assault in the search market.

"In those aspects of search where we already have elements...  where we can target different audiences for advertising. But no way will we do a frontal assault on Google and Yahoo!," he said.

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